Peter Reilly's Hard Won Justice

COMMENTARY

On Sept. 29, 1973, four decades ago, an 18-year-old homicide suspect told the state police during an eight-hour interrogation, "I definitely did what happened to my mother last night."

Peter Reilly of Falls Village, a hamlet in the Litchfield hills, confessed to battering, stomping on, repeatedly stabbing, raping and nearly decapitating the only parent he ever knew, Barbara Gibbons, 51. At trial half a year later, his confession earned him a cell in the state penitentiary.

Then came the three-year firestorm that rocked the state's justice system. Gov. Ella Grasso stepped in to end the mutiny of the state's leading police force as it blindly focused on the wrong man, ignoring known suspects.

The small towns in Litchfield County rose to Peter Reilly's defense. To his friends and neighbors, his innocence was obvious.

Peter was amiable and law-abiding. They could not fathom how a dubious confession, obtained by high-pressure psychological persuasion, could triumph over the absence of evidence. Lt. James Shay and his investigators had to know Peter had no time to commit the crime — and no motive. The medical findings suggested at least two attackers.

Bake sales and other efforts raised $60,000 to free Peter on bond for the appeal. The convicted killer was welcomed back at his high school to complete his senior year. Roxbury playwright Arthur Miller organized a powerful rescue party — a new attorney, a crack investigator, the nation's leading forensic pathologist and a top expert on mind control.

Superb reporting by The Hartford Courant's Joseph A. O'Brien and critical editorials in the Lakeville Journal raised alarming questions about the state police investigation. The case became a national sensation.

After a long hearing for a new trial in 1976, Superior Court Judge John A. Speziale, the future state chief justice, declared that a "grave injustice" occurred in his courtroom two years earlier. State's Attorney John Bianchi dropped dead on a golf course before deciding to risk a second trial. His successor, Dennis Santore, discovered a time bomb: a critical document, never revealed to the defense or the court, placing Peter five miles away at the time the state claimed he was home killing his mother.

Knowing that their conclusion would set off fireworks, the police sought public support by leaking their 58-page, confidential report before giving it to the governor.

"New Police Report Calls Reilly Slayer" was one headline regarding a bizarre new theory. Supposedly, upon arriving home, Peter backed his car over his mother. He then dragged her broken body into the bedroom to start his killing spree.

Gov. Grasso's legal counsel, Paul McQuillan, who was the prosecutor for Judge Maurice Sponzo's grand jury, was appalled by this monument of disinformation. Knowing that I spent three years on a just-finished book on the case, he gave me a copy of the secret police report. "Read it," he said. "Then do whatever you think best."

I was being used — the governor needed public support before taking on the state police — but I felt a need to act. At a Hartford press conference, I described the report's dozens of errors, denounced the rampant speculation, described the reinvestigation as a giant scam and called for the resignation or firing of the state police commissioner, Edward P. Leonard.

More important, State's Attorney Santore rejected the police report as "contrived," "unworthy" and "blatantly contradictory." The car theory was "completely untenable." He considered arresting Leonard.

The governor called Leonard in and he withdrew the McDonnell report. He resigned a few months later, but during a farewell tour of police barracks he told troopers it was about politics and public opinion, not mistakes. Thereafter, for decades, the department's answer to press inquiries about the Gibbons murder was, "We are satisfied with the result of our original investigation."

Such an embarrassing cops-gone-wild episode is likely never to be repeated. Today's police are better-trained professionals. They know modern DNA evidence exposed the frequency of wrong-man convictions, a quarter of them based on false confessions. They now concede the value of mandatory recording of interrogations.

Nonetheless, old habits die hard. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the the chief state's attorney's office unrelenting opposition to a new trial for Richard Lapointe, who was convicted in 1987 of killing his wife's grandmother. A conviction the late, former Manchester Police Chief Joseph Brooks described as a "perversion of justice" built on "lies and violations of the law."

No one is more adamant for Richard's freedom than Peter Reilly, now 58. Working as an auto parts salesman in Tolland County, he took the day off to attend the recent state Supreme Court hearing on Lapointe's fate. He wonders, as I do, how long it will take for a love of true justice to trump the state's inability to admit that it might be wrong.